Abstract
Varied Clarity is a body of work that reveals the materiality of language as a product of thought, in synchrony with creative labor and its material products, reassessing value outside of commodification. Using a conceptual framework of the index, this installation links the completed compositions of paper, print, and fabric with ephemera of the processes used to create them, creating meaning through implied connections between the disparate pieces that constitute the whole. Within this body of work, research and writing are presented as akin to physical creative production, the materiality of the poems is exposed, and in turn the language of craft—the cultivation of dye and fiber plants for natural dyeing, papermaking, weaving, ink making, and printmaking— becomes visible. In referencing the labor inherent in the composition of written and visual work, Varied Clarity suggests the depth and importance of process, and the immense potential for reading and understanding its products in a non-linear, on-going way. “It’s always struck me that the injunction to be clear is a very strange goal because it assumes a kind of physical transparency, that if you could just clean up your act somehow the materiality of writing would disappear.” Donna Haraway, in conversation with Gary A. Olsen.